525 
F7 



IH\ IE ROOTS OF A 



WORLD 
COMMONWEALTH 



BY 

P. T. FORSYTH, M.A., D.D. 

Author of 'Theology in Church and State/' etc.; Principal 
of Hackney Congregational College, London; 
Dean of the Faculty of Theology in the 
University of London; Late 
Lecturer at Yale Uni- 
versity, i 



NEW YORK 
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



^rice ten cents 



of D« 






THE ROOTS OF A 

WORLD 
COMMONWEALTH 

BY 

P. T. FORSYTH, M.A., D.D. 

Author of "Theology in Church and State" etc.; Principal 
of Hackney Congregational College, London; 
Dean of the Faculty of Theology in the 
University of London; Late 
Lecturer at Yale Uni- 
versity. 



NEW YORK 
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 






Out 



THE 

ROOTS OF A WORLD- 
COMMONWEALTH 

Prologue 

THERE must be a large number of people who feel 
that the true dimensions of the present war are 
beyond human grasp for the time. Our intelligence 
is still benumbed both by its magnitude and its 
methods. 

We can call it the real end of the Middle Ages, the 
last struggle of a belated feudalism. We could say 
several things like that. But already we perceive, what 
the great crises of the past reveal, that the leading 
actors themselves cannot measure the thing they are 
about, and are borne on the bosom of a conflict still 
vaster than that in which they feel directly engaged. 
Even a war like this is but a province of a profounder 
strife which runs through history, to realise which 
belongs to the insight of the master consciences and 
the deep religions of the race. Our chief religion de- 
scribes that strife as the standing world-war for the 
Kingdom of God and its righteousness ; and it regards 
it as the first charge on humanity. In modern Ian- 



2 The Roots of a World- Commonwealth 

guage it is the historic struggle for the primacy of 
the moral, the supremacy of conscience in human af- 
fairs — first of God's conscience, then of man's. 

I propose to regard it chiefly, though not wholly, 
from this ethical point of view. I could say much 
I want to say if I spoke but of the Kingdom of man. 
If I allude to the Kingdom of God I mean for my 
purpose Christian civilisation. I am not going so deep 
as the theology of the matter, though all begins and 
ends there — in a theology of the conscience of God. 

I speak a universal language when I dwell on pub- 
lic and historic righteousness, whose primacy is ex- 
pressed in the modern principle of the supremacy of 
conscience for all life, public or private, or what the 
philosophers call the hegemony of the moral. If I 
speak of the Cross, I mean, for my present purpose, 
the principle of sacrifice for sacred conscience and not 
merely at a king's command. If I use religious terms 
it is because the last religion must be the last morality 
and the last reality; and I wish, for my part, to have 
nothing to do with a religion which is otherwise. 

If the centre of our religion is not identical with 
the centre of our conscience, if the authority of a 
Church do not coincide with the authority for human 
morals, so much the worse for the Church. And for 
society there is nothing then but a double life, warring 
and distraught. That divided soul is the true cause 
of the slowness of man's conquest of nature. That 
double ethic is the real source of war in Christian 
lands. Religion comes to have another code than con- 
science, the nation has another standard than its re- 
ligion. And the end is neither conscience nor religion, 



The Roots rf a World- Commonwealth 3 

but a national egoism fed by zealotry and controlled 
by nothing. Wars arise between nations because of 
that war in each nation and each man. If we have no 
moral and imperial certainty anything may be true or 
right. Religion then becomes a sentiment, a comfort, 
an insurance, only not a control. And therefore the 
controls do not control, and the sword does. And the 
base and bulwark of civilisation is not the sword but 
the conscience. 

So the real issue in the conflict is not the most 
obvious. It is not discussed in press or parliaments. 
The most decisive, the final, forces are the subtlest, 
deepest, and often the most unwelcome. They are the 
forces of a historic, and even cosmic, righteousness, 
warring with evil and worth much blood. The crisis 
is not only tragic but demonic. There must be many, 
of various beliefs, for whom that righteousness runs 
through all great affairs, working deviously but con- 
tinually to the top, as an idea and a power more deep 
and dominant than all our conventional notions of a 
providence. One of the great moral effects of war 
with such a foe as we now have is a new and awful 
revelation of evil; how awful only the conscience can 
realise which grasps the last public righteousness of 
the Universe. 



The Gravamen 

THE decisive thing in my own attitude to the war, 
like that of millions more, has not been political 
but moral. It has not been the peril to Britain of a 
keen rival established on the Belgian seaboard. It 
has been a matter of conscience and not diplomacy. 
It has been the deliberate and thorough repudiation 
by Germany of any moral control when it collided 
with her national interests, along with the barbarism 
which that entails. It has been the shameful sacrifice 
of moral to elemental passion, of the German nation 
(which is a moral thing) to the German race (which 
is not). 

Germany might have brought Belgium to see that 
her suzerainty was the best thing for Belgian interests. 
She might have bought Belgium from the Belgians, or 
at least she might have bought Belgian independence, 
had it been for sale. That of course might have led 
to war with France, or England, or both, for reasons 
purely political and strategic. But such a war would 
not have rallied the whole of this country to its moral 
support. If Germany had not helped herself to Bel- 
gium in defiance of treaties as well as of humanity, if 
she had not done so on a principle which renounced 

5 



6 The Roots of a World- Commonwealth 

principle, if she had not justified herself in doing so 
by an explicit repudiation of public morality whenever 
it stood in the way of her national interests and armies 
— then there would have been the gravest division in 
my own mind, and in very many minds who are any- 
thing but pacifist cranks. Nay, the cleavage would 
have run down the middle of this country. It would 
probably have thrown against war the bulk of the 
working classes and the Free Churches. 

And, so far as my own convictions go, and those 
of the people I most know or respect, were this for 
us a war of exploitation and aggrandisement, we 
should not only have nothing to do with it, but we 
should protest and oppose it with all our might. It 
is this grasping, amoral, and unhallowed civilisation, 
wherever found, that has brought the world to such a 
pass. It is a passion which is the death of human so- 
ciety. If ever there was a cause that justified national 
resistance unto the death for the world's sake it is the 
active protest against the creed (so fatal to civilisa- 
tion) that a nation makes the conscience instead of the 
conscience the nation. The latter is our British belief, 
ever since the British genius spoke its great and saving 
word in Puritanism. Had the great German people 
ever risen to that moral height, even to the length of 
solemn regicide, had it risen to the conscience that 
founded America, there would have been one free 
nation the more in the world, and one that (with her 
splendid gifts now debased) could have been to the 
world of nations a blessing as great as she is now their 
bane. 



n 

"Heal Thyself" 

I know that our British history, when we were 
dealing with other lands or races, has to its account 
(with all our glories) phases and stages of which we 
have reason to be much ashamed. We are none of us 
happy about the way we got India, and none of us 
proud of the way we lost America. As a matter of 
fact, we are more or less abashed. And we have 
striven to heal ourselves. We cast back to Britain's 
old Puritan strain, which once saved the nation from 
destruction but could not save it from relapse. Puri- 
tan theology may be out of date, but the Puritan 
majesty of righteousness cannot die. It remained the 
last of the heroisms up till now, when it has received 
a worthy peer in our present war, and a worthy con- 
sort in the American people. We have not lost our 
sense of the righteousness that makes us ashamed. 

We repudiate the England of the Restoration and 
of the "bloods," as we do the Germany of the Junkers. 
We have carried our change even to repentance and 
amendment. Even at the worst we were not out for 
militarist world-empire. And at the best we have been 
recognised as trustees of justice over the world, and 
apostles of constitutional liberty. If you say we were 

7 



8 The Roots of a World- Commonwealth 

not worthy to be agents of a divine purpose, I reply 
that is not at our choice, but at His Who made of de- 
serters apostles. And we have repented in a way far 
more to the purpose than days of humiliation in 
Churches. For a century we have produced the fruits 
of repentance. Having saved Europe from Napoleon 
as we saved it long ago from Spain, we have gone on 
to foster the small nations. We are trying to do be- 
lated justice to Ireland, hindered chiefly by the temper 
which produced the wars of religion in the seventeenth 
century. We have changed our treatment of peasantry 
and poverty everywhere. We have totally changed 
our attitude to India, which we hold for the Indians 
when they are ripe. W T e have given our franchise and 
opened our Constitution to our foes the Boers of 
South Africa and made them valuable friends. We 
can win the peoples we conquer, and neither carries 
malice. We are not yet forsaken by the spirit of 
reconciliation. 



Ill 

The World-Righteousness 

This is very much more than a just war. It is not 
the clash of two huge egotisms, one of them with a 
rather better case than the other. That would not 
have rallied the nation or the nations. It would never 
have brought in America. Justice is a great word, 
but it is here too poor. It mostly means distributive 
justice, or fair play, what Burke calls commutative 
justice, which does not duly fit the vast, the universal, 
issue. We need a word more sovereign, one with 
more spiritual and imaginative tone thrilling in its 
moral chord. We need a term to describe constitutive 
justice. We need the greatest word in our moral lan- 
guage. We should rise to the word on which history 
and Bible crystallise — the word righteousness. "In 
the course of justice none of us should see salvation," 
but the course of righteousness means a moral re- 
demption for all nations. 

This is a war crucial for the New Humanity, for 
the world-righteousness of the Kingdom of God. It 
is a conflict of the kind which made Christianity at its 
heart a struggle for the world-righteousness in all na- 
tions. We stand in an agony against a passion of 
world-empire which frankly discards that idea. A 

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10 The Roots of a World- Commonwealth 

war merely just does not directly challenge the great- 
est of all moral realities, the Kingdom of God; but 
this does. A world-war does which is provoked by a 
nation that is frankly amoral amid its profuse appeals 
to God, and that challenges in the name of a racial 
civilisation the Kingship for which the Founder of its 
own religion stood and fell. That is at stake for 
which Christ died — the world-righteousness among the 
peoples of the Kingdom of God. Such a war is a 
function of the world's Redemption for all who have 
not sectarianised or sentimentalised that word. It is 
part of that historic translation of the world's deliv- 
erance by righteousness into the Kingdom of God 
which is the first charge upon the conscience of the 
Christian nations. 

As to the Christian place of war I will only say 
this. If a nation has ceased to be a sandheap of 
warring atoms and has risen to one corporate life, 
then it has at least a quasi-personality. In that degree 
it must have a conscience continuous through the fleet- 
ing generations. And if it be said that it cannot have 
a Christian conscience, it may be owned that the na- 
tional stage of ethic lags behind that of the best indi- 
viduals or the highest ideals. But it does not there- 
fore cease to be Christian, any more than Christ's 
treatment of lunacy ceases to be Christian because it 
took the imperative way of coercing demons in the 
name and service of the Kingdom of God. 

Peace at any price is less than pagan ; righteousness 
at any price, at the price of the blood of the sons of 
God, is the Christian principle. This is a war which 
rallies the conscience of the world, and ranges it 



The Roots of a World- Commonwea th 11 

against the aggressor. And the conscience of the 
world reflects the conscience of God which makes the 
moral order of His universe. Of such dimensions is 
this war to a moral imagination adequate to the 
situation. 

There have been wars for religion, for trade, for 
the forcing of what was thought to be a higher civili- 
sation; and there have been wars of principle where, 
as against Napoleon, we stood for the sanctity of law 
against force that has none. Of the last kind is this 
war, only on a vaster scale, and without the mitiga- 
tions of chivalry. It is as much more sordid than 
Napoleon's wars as Goethe's Mephistopheles is a mean 
spirit beside the Miltonic Satan. Milton alone could 
describe Germany's fall from heaven. It is a war on 
our part for the freedom of constitutional nations, 
federated against an empire which would erase, by 
military Ultramontanism, all nationality in its univer- 
sal grasp of sea and land. The mperor, the Head of 
the German Church, wages a war which he admits to 
have no relation to righteousness, but only to neces- 
sity. That is the bully's plea. And it seems to me 
Satanic. 

What is attacked is neither Belgium, Britain, nor 
France. It is the foundations of civilisation. It is 
that moral element which prevents all civilisation from 
falling back into barbarism. It is the righteousness 
which alone can cope with the elaborate egoism on 
which mere civilisation stands, and which alone can 
arrest the sentence of death which a mere civilisation 
carries in itself. What we see is the moral collapse 
of a civilisation based on money and all it can buy as 



12 The Roots of a World- Commonwealth 

the power of the Universe, a temper which has even 
infected the very Church as a benevolent concern ex- 
traordinarily expensive. A culture whether of the 
arts, the sciences, the industries, or the charities, taken 
alone, and without this moral yeast, sinks in the end 
to cruelty and lying, as the splendid Renaissance ended 
in Alexander VI. and Macchiavelli. 

This righteousness alone establishes and exalts a 
nation. For the nation's security is its moral Chris- 
tianity. And a nation is Christian not when a Church 
is established by law, but when righteousness is estab- 
lished by conscience within its borders. It is the pub- 
lic conscience that makes a nation Christian and as- 
sures its place. Neither a soul nor a people is saved in 
perpetuity even by the practice of individual virtue, 
but by the faith, honour, and service of a historic 
righteousness in its councils. That is what makes a 
nation great and keeps it so. The greater a nation is 
the more it is a loyal citizen of the Kingdom of God. 
In this light let us nc : fear what we may be unhappy 
enough to suffer, but rather what we might be weak 
enough to do. Let us despise danger in the pursuit 
of honour and duty. The worship of these things 
marks the democratic aristocracy. 



IV 

Brotherhood 

There is no idea that is more in the air outside the 
Central Empires than the idea of equal fellowship or 
brotherhood. In our armies it may be said to be the 
ruling idea, and it will mean very much when they 
return. It is part of the humane movement which for 
a century has been spreading over those parts of 
Christendom which remain sensitive to spiritual ideas 
wider than national range, or to moral sense which 
rises above racial egoism. It goes round the world 
with the sun, linking Russia with America, and it 
seems to miss only the Turk and the Teuton. It se- 
lects its devotees from the highest class and from the 
lowest, passing by only the bully and the profiteer. It 
is the aspect of Christianity which most commends 
itself to the general heart and the popular mind. And 
that is all to the good. 

But it has, or is apt to have, one defect. It is apt 
to be felt as a sympathetic idea rather than a moral. 
And that is lovely, but it does not wear. 

It is more readily felt as an enthusiasm than as a 
principle or a righteousness, as a sentiment than as an 
obligation, as "Thou mayst love" rather than "Thou 
shalt love." Alliance without obligation almost in- 

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14 The Roots of a World- Commonwealth 

vites discord. Clans cannot co-operate (else Culloden 
would have been different) ; great nations can and 
must. 

Brotherhood comes home to the crowded and glori- 
ous hour rather than to the silent seasons where the 
great powers master life. It may belong to the after- 
dinner eloquence rather than to the courage of three 
in the morning. It feels that man is one by his heart 
more than by his conscience, and great by his emo- 
tions rather than by his moral loyalties. "One touch 
of nature makes the whole world kin" we say. And so 
it does for an occasion. Does it in perpetuity? Is 
that the ground of our standing conviction and prac- 
tice of human unity? Fellow-feeling is powerful to 
thrill us; is it all we need to establish and settle us as 
a human race, or even as a people ? Can national unity 
rest only on racial enthusiasm? Is it more secure 
with the poets than with the puritans ? Is racial preju- 
dice and affinity a world bond? Is it not turned, in 
such a war as this, to be the despotism of one race at 
the cost of all nationality besides, and all freedom 
everywhere? The German brotherhood is as strong 
as ours, but Prussianism puts a moral blight on it. 

What is to make fellowship perpetual and fraternity 
universal? What is to lift us above gusts of enthusi- 
asm, and secure us in a standing reality of union? 
What is to moralise fraternity? What is to place 
brotherhood among the ethical and not merely the sen- 
timental powers? 

It is a greater ideal still. It is the passion for right- 
eousness. It is righteousness that endures. It is the 
moral that is the royal, and the holy that is the eter- 



The Roots of a World- Commonwealth 15 

nal. What binds the men of the army into their com- 
radeship but the cause in which they fight, suffer and 
die ? They long unspeakably to return to the freedoms 
and fraternities of peace, but by all accounts they are 
still more firmly and grimly bent on seeing this thing 
through and making an end of the evil in it. They 
are most one in their passion that the world-righteous- 
ness for which they came out shall be secured, that 
freedom shall be delivered from force, and democracy 
given room to live. 

This is only one forcible illustration of the principle 
that fellowship has its real ground and last guarantee 
in righteousness, that brotherhood rests on father- 
hood, that the trusty foundation of comradeship is not 
a mutual feeling but a common loyalty, that a nation 
has no final stay which discards conscience, disowns 
ethic, perverts righteousness to the right of the 
stronger, and falls back for its weapons on the crudest 
or cunningest forms of the struggle for existence. It 
is but another instance of the principle that a sound 
society of man rests on the righteous Kingdom of 
God, and that the nations that forget it shall be turned 
into hell — as in hell by its neglect we now are. 

Fellowship is a fine and engaging idea, but the 
moral idea of righteousness with a universal royalty 
is a power greater and more splendid still. The wave 
of brotherhood is really carried on the tide of right- 
eousness, and comrade loyalty rests on loyalty to the 
King of nations Whose throne is the conscience of a 
world. Great and dear are the hours when hearts 
flow together and are enlarged; but still greater and 
more during are those times when we combine to 



16 The Roots of a World- Commonwealth 

realise the majesty of conscience, and the royalty of 
a right we do not make but obey. 

This is the passion that honours a nation, and guar- 
antees respect for all nations besides, which honours 
nationality as a sacred principle, and secures it in 
public responsibility. The fraternal passion of the 
hour can only be secured in the loftier passion of a 
righteousness which outlives all Time, and which sub- 
dues all space to something more than civilisation. 
And it is for this righteousness that our armies unite. 
This is the deep and real Entente. 



V 

Sacrifice 

Besides fraternity, and in connection with it, there 
is another idea which has laid hold of the finest spirits 
in most lands — the idea of sacrifice. There are those 
who say and feel that without the spirit and practice 
of sacrifice no nation can exist. Of these some would 
even go to the extreme of saying that it is that on 
which the nation rests. The nation's health, they say, 
stands at last on the surrender of the egotism of the 
natural man, and not on the facilities it provides for it. 
Sacrifice like comradeship has become a passion, and 
a passion which has seized with great and noble power 
our youth — youth which we used to think egoist 
enough. There are some who have believed in sacri- 
fice when they believed in little else. And indeed it 
wields a spell which only a lost soul can refuse to feel. 

But here again we are called upon to reflect and 
question. And that not because we are victims of the 
critical temper, but, for one thing, because we are faced 
by the fact that the side we call right cannot claim a 
monopoly of such a virtue. There is as much sacri- 
fice among our enemies as among ourselves, as there 
may be as much bravery. Indeed there is possibly 
more individual sacrifice in Germany for the father- 

17 



18 The Roots of a World- Commonwealth 

land than in England. The temper of a certain obe- 
dience is more strong there than anywhere on our 
side. It amounts to a docility which is even fatal, fatal 
to national dignity, self-respect, or freedom, fatal even 
to the care to be free. So that we are driven to ask 
if such sacrifice or obedience per se is really a moral 
power. Can it carry a world's civilisation? It is im- 
pressive, but does it renew its own strength ? It has a 
great aesthetic value, and it calls out a chorus of 
poetry; but is it ethical, does it make necessarily for 
the last and greatest ends of society ? Has it the stay- 
ing power of moral kingship and its righteousness? 

The truth is that neither sacrifice, martyrdom, nor 
obedience has in itself moral value. These features 
may rise to a kind of sanctity round a very defective 
moral core. You can be as devoted in sacrifice to an 
evil power as to a good. You can be as thorough in 
obedience to a usurping as to a lawful lord. Sacrifice 
is morally neuter. Its power is not in itself. There- 
fore it cannot be the foundation of a nation, nor the 
security of humanity. It cannot be a staying power. 
Everything depends on its moral interior. Everything 
turns on who sacrifices, and for what end. What is 
obeyed ? Who is served ? For what are we martyrs ? 
To lay down life is not necessarily a moral action. A 
man can sacrifice his life for an illicit passion which but 
scatters tragedy all around. Everything turns on the 
cause or the person that commands the sacrifice. Is it 
for righteousness? It is not the amount of devotion 
that matters, but the quality, the dignity of it. And 
its dignity is a moral feature. The sacrifice of the 
German soldier becomes such a brutal thing because it 



The Roots of a World- Commonwealth 19 

is offered to an amoral power without a soul, because 
the country, with all its virtues, has sold itself to mere 
militarism and has become the tool of a materialistic 
idealism. It has been made to believe in a civilisation 
that rests on that kind of pow r. It is sacrifice to a 
God without a conscience. And such a devotee is a 
minister of unrighteousness, Lucifer's viceroy, and an 
official in the synagogue of Satan. 

The sacrifice that tells in the end is the sacrifice 
that holds most of righteousness as the ground of his- 
tory and society, and means most for it. What moral- 
ises all sacrifice and all society from the centre of our 
religion is not merely a classic case of sacrifice, but 
something that establishes the final righteousness of 
the world, and recovers the moral soul of universal 
things. My point is that no amount of the humane 
virtues, no fraternities or valours, will save a nation 
or justify a cause if it defy the conscience of the race, 
as Germany with all her great qualities has done. 



VI 

Social Liberty 

The war is a war for the world's liberty. It in- 
terests many of us most because it is not a war for 
Britain's place, except in so far as Britain is a trustee 
for that universal freedom. Liberty is another word 
which must acquire a moral content if it is to justify 
the convulsion of mankind. It is righteousness that 
gives the law to patriotism and consecrates liberty. 
We war with a people that claims the freedom to 
override mankind's liberty at will, with a power which 
has been ostentatious in its hatred of it, and which 
is up against the free conscience of the world. To 
give way to that power is to banish, with conscience, 
also liberty from history, and to reduce it to a Pri- 
vatsache, a private fad. It is true that crimes have 
been done in the name of liberty; but they were caused 
by a liberty as lawless as is Prussian tyranny, as much 
of a law to itself, and one that cared more for place 
than for right, more for rights than for duties. There 
is a power which surmounts mere nationalism, mere 
patriotism, mere empire. It is the power of the world- 
righteousness, which I keep saying is the real issue 
in this war. To push empire, trade, or ambition at 
the cost of that, or to its neglect, is to serve the empire 

20 



The Roots of a World-Conimonwealth 21 

of man's enemy, to say nothing of God's. It is cer- 
tainly not worth human life and suffering on a world 
scale; for the whole world is not worth the moral 
soul. To lead minor nations into war for the greater 
nation's aggrandisement is to go into the service and 
pay of Satan; who always exacts the letter of his 
bond, and takes the uttermost farthing before he is 
done. It is the free conscience that makes the free 
man. And the free conscience is one that is at home 
in the humane righteousness that Germany discards 
for herself and fights in the world. 



VII 

Democracy 

The issue in the great conflict has been well de- 
scribed, by a late comer who has said some of the 
finest things about it, as the effort to make and keep 
the world a safe place for democracy. It is a war for 
democracy against dominion. It is our last conflict 
with expiring feudalism, with its robber barons and 
its helot crowds. But what is the secret spell in either 
democracy or freedom? Do they mean the absence 
of all dominion, all control? Is righteousness and its 
sovereignty, just outside democracy, in a neutrality 
more or less benevolent? Is the whole range of the 
moral order of a historic world just parallel with 
democracy, as a co-ordinate power at an ocean's dis- 
tance? Or is this order a living factor, and at last 
the dominant factor, in this as in every form of human 
society? Is democracy but self-government? But that 
might be a colossal egoism were it all. It might be- 
come Germanic. Is liberty but the right and room of 
every man or nation to be themselves, and develop, 
like German behaviour, according to the law of their 
own uncouth being ? Is that really more than the very 
egoism of self-realisation which is doing all the mis- 
chief? It could be as cruel as the free love which 

22 



The Roots of a World- Commonwealth 23 

leads the wretched aesthete to discard his seduced vic- 
tim when he is tired of her. The bond (if you please) 
has become unreal, and interferes with the free de- 
velopment of his personality. 

Would the mere passion for democratic independ- 
ence end war between democracies? Is all won for 
liberty when democracy wars down its political foe? 
What is to unite democracies? What is to protect 
liberty or democracy against itself? What is to 
save democracy in its own soul as well as to secure it 
in its own place ? What is to save it from its internal 
foe and make it find its own soul? What is to de- 
liver it from the Bourse lust which infatuates Ger- 
many? What is to rescue it from its isolation from 
human society, or protect it from political sectarianism, 
and a mere nonconforming conscience of "Thou shalt 
not" ? What is to guard it from the moral anarchy of 
individualism, and make it a real factor of humane 
civilisation? What but the reign of the universal law, 
a national obedience to it, and a federation of peoples 
free in it? What but our great object of this war, so 
terrible in its righteousness? 

The supremacy of conscience is the strength at once 
of the soul, of the nation, of humanity; and conscience 
is less an obedience to particular laws than that rever- 
ence for law as such which Germany has despised and 
defied. The supremacy of conscience is much more 
than its liberty; and its supremacy is its submission 
to Right. When free America joined this war she 
crowned the liberty that frees the slave with the loy- 
alty that creates the servant ; she rose from the hatred 
of coercion to the reverence for the moral authority 



24 The Roots of a World- Commonwealth 

of the world. And the rally of France and England 
was an act less of egoism, and far more of obedience. 
It was not the conscience of supremacy, but the su- 
premacy of conscience. 

Can a fraternity, one asks again, live without a 
loyalty? Can it live on the loyalty of its members 
to each other, on the principle of taking in each 
other's washing? Can it live without a common loy- 
alty to a righteousness it does not make but take, which 
descends on it out of heaven, and which is the power 
that rules the soul, the sun, and all the stars? 

The first concern of human society is not to make 
its own laws, but to follow God's righteousness. The 
first interest of liberty is that authority. Liberty can 
reign but in righteousness. German amoralism means 
world-wide despotism. And the more universal the 
liberty is the more urgent must that righteousness be, 
and the more enduring its reign. Democracy is there 
for the sake of Humanity, and Humanity is there 
for the kingship of Right. 

Humanity is more than fraternity. Democracy is 
something deeper than liberty. It is responsibility. 
The entirely free nations are the nations wholly re- 
sponsible to righteousness — not to liberty ; which might 
be the liberty to stand aside doubting in an abject 
spirit while the right was crucified. Nationality is not 
unchristian nor unrighteous. What is so is national 
amoralism. Democratic freedom is better than Teu- 
tonic obedience, not because it discards obedience and 
lives on the casual, the swaggering, or the pushing, 
but because it has a better obedience for its root; 
beneath it are the everlasting laws, and over it the 



The Roots of a World-Commonwealth 25 

great white throne. The one thing that keeps civilisa- 
tion from a return to barbarism is its service (to blood 
if need be) of the kingdom of a righteousness historic 
and eternal. 

The more sound a democracy is the more it must 
find its strength in all that makes such a word as 
righteousness kindling, and the thing itself supreme. 
It is the great tonic for war-weariness. We are set 
where we are in the battle by a power that will not 
let us go. There is no discharge in that war. How- 
ever faint we must pursue. It is not our own ends 
we serve. For we are finding our soul in the lord- 
ship of a cause much greater than our own, and in 
a realm for which we cannot do better than die, except 
as we live to serve it as our death does. The ever- 
lasting righteousness has called us to arms. To lay 
them down would be moral mutiny, of which the end 
is spiritual death; in which Germany, with all her 
vitality, is as a nation dead. 

And the same passion of righteousness that both 
kindles nations and quells them must come to rule also 
the relations, within each nation, of soul and soul, and 
of class and class, ere we really have a better world. 
Without this passion religion is hollow and patriotism 
ignoble. What I call world-righteousness is the inmost 
soul of religion; and it makes our present conflict not 
indeed a war of religion but a religious war, a war for 
the moral salvation of mankind and its civilisation 
from a power that will do all this again and worse if 
such power be left it. Divide et impera. It will take 
the nations one by one and devour them for the glory, 
honour and immortality of the prince of this world. 



26 The Roots of a World- Commonwealth 

Such are the considerations that rule not with one 
only but with many, many who hate the very name of 
war, who loved the old Germany with admiration and 
gratitude and who hope for very much yet from her 
powerful mind, chastened temper, and free future, who 
look to some League of Nations, and who are ready 
to turn even on their own land if ever it yield itself as 
the servant of public wickedness, and if it should rise 
up, in the name of whatever culture, to defy the hu- 
mane kingdom of the righteous God of the nations. 



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